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[FRENCH] Do Jinki’s Frightening Response to Edgar Allan Poe
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the detective story as a genre, born under the sign of deduction and intellectual play, has progressively embraced different periods and different geographies by developing complex literary systems: elegant British charades, sensual American crime novels, popular French or Italian atmospheric novellas. Some countries—like Iceland, the United States, Sweden, or South Korea—have even turned the detective story into a national genre in its own right. But the ingredients are always the same, always simple: an investigator who confuses, outwits or accompanies the reader, an enigma that sounds as complex to solve as an impossible mathematical problem, a dark part of society to explore. The same is true of the novels by Do Jinki, recently published in French by Éditions Matin Calme, which specializes in Korean literature. The character of Judge Gojin is in a way very typical: he takes on a Koreanised version of a figure similar to that of the great European detectives at the turn of the twentieth century, the policeman who is not quite a policeman. Like Sherlock Holmes, he’s a great psychologist. Like Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, he’s also a man who inspires confidence, a reassuring figure who keeps his distance from the dramas he explores. A former judge, Judge Gojin is a member of law enforcement, but he’s also an outsider. He’s a maverick, who first seeks to unravel a mystery by the book and doesn’t play the vigilante. But that’s where the classicism of Do’s novels ends. This quickly becomes clear on reading Mental Suicide, the second novel to be published by Éditions Matin Calme. From the very first page, the writer seeks to lead his reader astray. The narrative alternates between different, sometimes contradictory, points of view, each of which cultivates a different enigmatic area, giving the story a syncopated, jolting rhythm where chiaroscuros are constant. This is true, for example, in the depiction of the character Kil Yeong-in: we don't know whether he’s a victim, a witness, an executioner, or a bit of all of these until the very last pages. The same goes for Yi Tak-o, a doctor with ambiguous morals, whose role could be that of Dr. Frankenstein, or of Judge Gojin’s nemesis; or he could be a false lead, a false culprit. The reader is quickly lost. Do’s talent is to leave the reader wondering, keeping us on the edge of our seats for more than 300 pages. In this context, Dr. Yi Tak-o’s consulting room, where he offers his patients “mental suicide,” is a literary invention of great importance. His aim is to kill part of his patients’ minds to push them into dissociative disorders. In fact, the characters lose touch with reality—particularly Kil Yeong-in, who goes to Yi Tak-o to cure himself of his melancholy following the sudden departure of his wife, whom he discovers had a lover. The drama of Mental Suicide, as we shall discover at the end, lies in the desire to reinvent oneself, to disappear by changing one’s life, personality and identity. It plays with the multiplication of personalities made possible by contemporary life, the internet and social networks—to the point of absurdity, even murder. In doing so, the novel, which is deeply rooted in a reality that is both Korean and universal, becomes almost fantastic. It comes close to a tale, a horror story, in the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the great pioneers of the detective story. In the end, Gojin is clearly closer to Poe’s protagonist C. Auguste Dupin than to the detectives of Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle. He succeeds in finding the logic, the reason, behind the madness. A madness that turns out to be perfectly contemporary, perfectly credible and realistic—unlike the plots of Poe, which bordered on the unreal. Perhaps the most important lesson of Do’s beautiful second novel translated into French is this: today’s world, in Korea as elsewhere, has made Poe’s horrific narrative architecture possible and credible. Two centuries later, Do Jinki has turned Edgar Allan Poe into a realistic novelist. Nils C. AhlWriter, Editor, Literary Critic for Le Monde
by Nils C. Ahl
[JAPANESE] Journey to Memory and Identity: Hope in a “Passive” Narrative
Contemporary society holds speed, clarity, and rationality as traits of indisputable value. We’ve grown increasingly impatient and rapidly consume easy-to-digest novels and TV storylines. When approaching Bae Su-ah’s novel Uru Is Going To Be Late, however, the reader is immediately intercepted by the text. The chronology and characters are ambiguous; the story chaotic, with episodic fragments of memory scattered throughout; and the metaphors sometimes border on the absurd. Despite the vagueness of the text, one still finds oneself turning page after page. What is the force behind this mysterious allure? Uru Is Going to be Late is composed of three episodes, each featuring a female protagonist named Uru. The stories take place a few days after January 23, 2019, just after the death of the American filmmaker Jonas Mekas. Although the three Urus have different lives in different spaces, they cannot remember who they are or where they’re from. Still, they share the common themes of memory and identity loss. In the first episode, Uru travels to a foreign country to meet a shaman. In the second episode, after living in Brazil for some decades, Uru returns to the home of her deceased mother to write a novel. The third Uru finds herself at a hotel within a dream and finally decides to leave everything behind. The timeline is disjointed, and the only certainties that resonate with the readers are tension, anxiety, and nostalgia along with a faint hope, and an intangible, looming presence. Grappling with this fragmented text, readers are pulled between the lines, peering beyond the words. Behind the text, unseen and inexpressible entities come and go, occasionally revealing passages that speak to the essence of life. Just as readers grasp something, they feel a momentary sense of relief and excitement, but it is merely a shadow that quickly slips back into the space between the lines. The author Bae Su-ah studied in Germany, engaging in both creative writing and translation work. She holds a unique position among Korean writers due to her avant-garde style, which attempts to deconstruct grammar and syntax. Her search for the true essence of things through disorder, rather than consistent, structured thought, may have been cultivated through her experience as a translator. Translation requires conveying not only accuracy, but also the essence and feeling of the original work. This work captures Bae’s distinctive approach: it is visually conceived, like a monologue in a theatrical performance. The three episodes were inspired by the structure of a triptych, characterized by intense impressions that linger like afterimages. One such lingering impression is the memory of the primordial. It might be found in the protagonist’s name “Uru,” which brings to mind the first Mesopotamian city-state of Uruk (or it may be a reference to the German prefix ur-, from which we get uroboros, the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its tail—Ed.), or in the storytelling done through Uru’s deceased mother. Another afterimage is the flesh through which we experience bodily sensations like dancing and eating. There are words that are “spoken” through the body and then disappear—the unexpressed words within. In an interview, Bae stated that she does not wish to control the direction words take. Rather, she lets the words take her in the direction they want to go. She called these “words of passivity.” She writes by listening to the voices echoing within her—waiting, and surrendering herself to them when they appear. Something primitive lies therein. Bae finds hope in such passivity. As a tactic to ease the violence felt in a world such as ours, one might even call it “adaptability.” Grasping a sense of awe and hope in moments that escape expression or brushing against the soul through a passage dripping in vivid colors, through which we might touch the soul—these sensations allow us to experience the shamanistic aspects still inherent in modern Korean life. Opening a channel of communication with the reader through her writing, Bae manages to express the inexpressible. Her endless challenge is writing itself. Only Bae can open this communication channel that carves out a new possibility in literature, returning to the essence of what a word is/can mean. Through repeated readings of this book, readers too will eventually pass through that channel to a world of new meaning, perhaps like Uru’s journey.
by Naoko Hirabaru
[ITALIAN] The (Hi)story Told in Black Ink
The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim is a healthy immersion in the reality of history. And for fans of manhwa comics and Korean pop culture in general, it offers the opportunity to appreciate a perhaps unexpected complexity—a touching attention to personal and collective roots. The style of the drawing is an imperious black and white, the ink producing sharp lines on the page. The lettering chosen for the Italian edition goes well with the images, recalling the aspect of handwritten hangeul.With this graphic novel we understand how the brutal legacy of the Japanese colonial occupation (1910-1945) and the violence of the Korean War (1950-1953) that left the country divided is still painfully present in society and in individuals today (too often the world forgets that the war never officially ended). The narration in ten chapters proceeds back and forth, because memory is not linear. We start from 2020 and with this blunt line by the narrator and protagonist, a young writer: “I abandoned my mom.” With these words, one of the themes of the book already imposes itself: the relationship with the parents’ generation, the burden of responsibility that weighs on the shoulders of the younger generations, the burden of expectations fed by the older generations after surviving the war. Which brings us to another theme, connected to the previous one: the economic fragility that arose out of the industrial and financial mechanisms of South Korea and the sense of economic insecurity, shared by many peers in other societies around the world, from Europe to North America. However, it is through the protagonist’s mother, who takes center stage in the second chapter, that Gendry-Kim explores memory and its painful elaborations. The protagonist knows that her mother had had another son before the war, from a happy marriage that had eased the sufferings of a harsh childhood in the poverty of an undeveloped Korea humiliated by the Japanese yoke, as we read in the third chapter. This section tells the mother’s story when she was a child, developing as a sort of reverse idyll, where the harsh conditions of life do not erase flashes of poetry, and the author’s drawings seem to quote here and there traditional landscapes. The illustration of the pet dog is very tender: his fate anticipates the horrors that are brewing, because the Imperial Japanese Army scours the Korean countryside to enlist young people. Then comes the marriage of the young woman, the arrival of the Soviet troops who defeat the Japanese, the fear of the occupation but also the hopes for a better future, while the protagonists of the nationalist movement assert themselves. They are “happy still,” as the fifth chapter alludes to, because the couple has a son and everything seems to have a smile. But in 1950, the war begins and we are shown the anguish of fleeing columns of refugees, the nightmare of those who lose sight of their husband and son in the chaos—as happens to the protagonist’s mother. Here, the drawing style becomes expressionist, and thick black ink dominates the page. The trauma of forced separations crosses the whole of Korean society like an invisible fault line. The meetings agreed to by the governments of the South and the North, managed by the Red Cross, are not able to really alleviate the sufferings, and The Waiting shows it through the story of two sisters who meet again in 2018, sixty-eight years after their last meeting. In the last chapters, the protagonist appeals to her own personal memory: the relationship with the mother’s new partner and her son (who therefore becomes the writer’s new brother), the search for the lost partners who remained in the North, the loss of her sister. She is tormented by the awareness that her mother has lived two lives, and that the second has not been able to erase the first or to cauterize the wounds. In the end, what is left? The memories. The protagonist collects her mother’s memories and becomes her guardian and witness, going to live not far from the 38th parallel that divides the Koreas, on Ganghwa Island “located directly across the channel from North Korea.” She thinks, “When Mom visits next time, I’ll take her to the Ganghwa Peace Observatory." There is hope, despite it all.Marco Del CoronaCulture desk/la Lettura supplementCorriere della Sera
by Marco Del Corona
[RUSSIAN] Everything is (Not) Fine
The short story collection The Age of Benign Violence is already the third book by Jeong Yi Hyun released in Russian, following the novels Sweet City of Mine and What You Never Know. One of the likely reasons for the strong interest in the author abroad is her pronounced focus on globalized contemporariness: her characters are devoid of distinctly specific national features and are placed in conditions perfectly familiar to the middle class worldwide. Therefore, Jeong’s works have a rather low entry threshold, despite their thematic and emotional depth. The tone of the collection is set by the very first lines of the first story, “Miss Cho, the Tortoise, and I.” The protagonist, a nearly forty-year-old employee at a nursing home, admits to fearing the future: he prefers not to talk about what might happen, hoping that by doing so, he can avoid it. His ideal life is to lie in bed with a soft toy kitten and stroke its head. Most of the main characters in other stories also want to control absolutely everything and to prevent events that unsettle established routines, disrupting the “natural” course of things. However, controlling everything is impossible, so they need to narrow their worlds as much as possible. Just as it is natural and soothing for the nursing home employee to listen to the grumbling old man from room 1206 every day, the only right choice for one of the two heroines of the story “It’s Nothing” is to endanger the life of her premature granddaughter and think only of her daughter’s grades. For the other, it is to devote all her efforts to obtaining compensation for the exploded lid of a frying pan and not to care for this very baby. Also motivated by the same desire to cement her existence, the woman in the story “Ferris Wheel at Night” has been working in a school she has disliked for twenty-five years, but is willing to stay there until retirement. The essence of most of these protagonists—who are mainly women— revolves around exhausting work and the need to meet the increasing demands for a quality life: everyone strives to gather all kinds of evidence of their success, and no one wants to lose and end up on the periphery. Under the guise of caring for its members, society dictates how they must live within the confines of narrow and uniform boundaries that deprive them of individuality and sometimes humanity. For example, Jeong describes the institution of marriage in a highly unromantic way. Love exists only for the young, and afterwards economic expediency, shared bills, real estate, and children take the place of love as the connecting links between men and women. The so-called “benign violence” begins in childhood: with the parents’ readiness to sacrifice their children’s happiness for their predicted future stability and security. Children appear as the projections of the social fears and desires of the adults, like modeling clay. Adults themselves willingly mold their children into suitable figures and actively use the services of the education system to accomplish this. In the story “Forever Summer,” the mother limits her daughter’s food intake and sends her to prestigious international schools where the girl faces insults or, at best, indifference. The mother from “Anna” chooses an English-language preschool for her son, where children are expelled if they speak their native tongue, and there the boy experiences constant stress and becomes completely silent. But a person’s existence in Jeong’s stories is not as bleak and predictable as it might seem. Life always finds a way to elude control, because new people regularly enter it. And we need them, because occasionally they knock the ground from under our feet and reveal our humanity. Sometimes your father’s ex-lover gets in touch with you and later gives you her giant tortoise (“Miss Cho, the Tortoise, and I”). Sometimes you meet your soulmate in the most unexpected corner of the world, even if you two may have to part ways soon (“Forever Summer”). And sometimes behind the door of the most ordinary apartment in the most ordinary building you encounter a pain you could never have imagined (“The House in a Drawer”).Dmitry RumyantsevEditor, Translator
by Dmitry Rumyantsev
[ENGLISH] The Violent Violation of Violets
Over two decades since it was first published in Korea, Kyung-sook Shin’s sixth novel Violets is seducing a fresh legion of admirers thanks to a splendid new English translation by Anton Hur, who previously translated Shin’s The Court Dancer. The book chronicles the lyrical and tragic story of Oh San, a woman born in the countryside in the 1970s. Marked by her status as an outsider during her youth and molded by a conservative society, she evolves from the “little girl” that Shin describes in the novel’s very first line, into a circumspect and diffident young woman working in a flower shop in central Seoul.
Like many of Shin’s books, such as The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, the protagonist takes after the author in several ways. Shin and San both hail from the countryside and moved to the big city alone at a young age to pursue a dream of writing. Shin first found work in Seoul in a factory, but San, after failing to find a position at a publishing house, takes on a job at a flower shop in a small corner of Gwanghwamun, a vast boulevard, steeped in history and spewing out from the city’s grandest palace.
There, she befriends co-worker Lee Su-ae, who has her own demons but subsumes them in a lively and forthright personality. Her green fingers guide San’s green hands through the store’s endless array of colorful flora. The pair begin to room together and while they mostly keep to themselves, a few men begin to intrude on San’s life, including a playboy photographer who arrives at the store to take some shots of violets.
Recent Korean female protagonists tend to be in charge of their own destinies while San is a character who lacks agency. This can make her frustrating to follow, as a few words here and there might have saved her from some of her predicaments. However, that frustration morphs into understanding by the narrative’s close when it becomes clear that San is a symbol of generations of Korean women—she fails to talk her way out of problems for the simple reason that she doesn’t have a voice.
This 2001 novel transports us to the Korean media landscape of that time, thanks to its pensive protagonists and clear-sighted metaphors. San is the kind of character we don’t see or read about much anymore these days. She is outwardly beautiful but lives her life on the inside, unable to share her thoughts with those around her ever since a crushing disappointment at a young age set her on a lonely path.
At first, Shin’s descriptive prowess holds the tendrils of society's violence and oppression which spiral around San at bay. She limns her protagonist’s path with rich and evocative descriptions of flora, which masks the gently widening gap between this woman and the society she unconsciously begins to break away from. As the curve grows exponentially sharper, it veers too far away from the status quo. Strife and violence begin to erupt around her. She is assaulted from all sides—sounds of domestic violence from the landlord’s family below her; a fire across the hall. Unable to escape, the violence is eventually directed toward her. Shin relays the ravages of this loneliness with unsentimental prose, turning the sensitive symbols introduced earlier on into the cruel allegories of the book’s climax.
Shin’s similes vividly imprint themselves on our imagination throughout the novel. There are the “soft bumps of vertebrae” on Su-ae’s back sweetly expressed as “tree roots” or the image of the thirsty summer pavement which keeps sucking up water no matter how often San douses it. That last image appears frequently, each time more foreboding than the last, until we realize that it is the very city itself sucking San dry. San must be careful not to overwater flowers but the pavement’s thirst is unquenchable.
The root of that loneliness is a patch of wild minari, the hardy edible plant now known to western audiences thanks to Lee Isaac Chung’s Oscar-nominated film Minari—one wonders if Chung’s 2020 film was inspired by Shin’s book. Seemingly growing of its own accord, the minari patch brings the villagers of San’s past together, and on one fateful spring’s day, it binds San and her childhood friend Namae together in a forbidden kiss. Confused, the latter immediately recoils in shame from the spontaneous act of intimacy and abandons the confused San, who will never be able to express herself properly again.
Of all the symbols in the book, the violets are those which are the most distinctly described. This includes the Greek mythology behind their “Eyes of Io” nickname, but the most salient point is that they grow like weeds rather than flowers. One is prized and nurtured while the other is plucked and cast away. Which one is San?
Shin’s views on what it meant to be a woman in Korean society in the early 2000s are made vividly clear as the story edges toward a harrowing climax that sees society trample on these fragile flowers.
by Pierce Conran
[CHINESE] The Courage to Choose Love
Humans and aliens live in the same universe. Hana, the protagonist of The Only Hana on Earth, is an environmentalist who lives a low-carbon life managing a shop with the idea of recycling used clothing. Kyeong-Min, Hana’s boyfriend of eleven years, heads to Canada to watch a meteor shower and decides to abandon her to wander the universe. In the meantime, an alien creature decides to take Kyeong-Min’s place and travels 20,000 light years to Earth after falling in love with Hana. When her boyfriend comes back with a completely different personality, what will Hana do when her life is upended?
While the relationship between the two characters is the main topic of this book, there is also a secondary plot following Hana as she heads out to the universe to pursue true love. The two storylines are essentially the same if alien features are not taken into account. Both are about people/beings who give up everything in their search for love.
Chung allows readers to explore an alien world with bizarre, illusory scenes presented like shifting kaleidoscope images. Chung’s environmentalist ethic is evident in the way she imagines one of the alien species with plant-like traits—it appears human but has vine-like hair that can photosynthesize and fingers that can absorb nutrients from the soil. Perhaps it could be viewed as an environmentally-friendly human evolution that has taken place on another planet.
Within this science fiction backdrop, the love story becomes romantic and readers will think of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little prince and his rose. Even between different species we can still feel emotions, share the same values and hold our memories precious. Hana is the rose for Kyeong-Min the alien, and his love for her is based on Hana simply being herself. Despite being a different life form, he does everything for her without hesitation.
So, what is love for these two characters? If you are faced with a situation where someone who looks like the person you love loves “you,” what would you do? Would you hate a creature that has come all the way to reach you? Would you be able to love him? It really needs time to think over. But why did Hana accept this alien’s love despite her initial suspicion and fear? Because their “understanding with each other was designed, cut and sewn by the universe.” In addition to love, they share the same philosophy, and Hana’s open-minded spirit also plays a large role in accepting the fact that Kyeong-Min is an alien.
The names in this story are connected to perspectives about love. Hana’s former boyfriend, Kyeong-Min, is now called “X” after his return because the name “Kyeong-Min” is reserved for the person she has always loved. Therefore, in her opinion, a name is not simply a name, but something more precious that can contain love, hate or any other feeling for the other person. Perhaps names in The Only Hana on Earth are similar to the way names are understood in Kim Chunsu’s famous poem “Flower”:
by Yu Hsin Hsin
[SPANISH] To Buy Forgiveness
Beatings, insults, forced labor, pills, and more beatings. This summarizes the lives of Si-bong and Jin-man, the protagonists of Lee Kiho’s debut novel, At Least We Can Apologize. This pair of men, of uncertain age and origin, barely remember who they were before being institutionalized. They don’t even know the name of the place where they are, only that while inside it one of them has grown six centimeters and the other has gained eight kilograms. They would have continued this way until their deaths and burial on a nearby mountain, as has happened to other interned residents, but one day they are suddenly freed. At the instigation of a friend, they unintentionally get the authorities to close that mysterious torture center that was supposed to be a mental hospital. From that moment, Jin-man—the narrator of this story—and Si-bong become like pinballs. Life carries them from one place to another until they realize that they have to somehow earn their bread. What better way than to apologize on behalf of others? It’s all they know how to do, anyway. Didn’t they train for that in “the institution,” as they called the place where they were. Beatings, insults, forced labor, pills, more beatings. And apologizing. Since his first story, “Birney,” published in 1999, Lee resolved to break with traditional Korean narrative and became a writer who serves as one of the reference points when speaking of the renovation of Korean literature at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. And fortunately, he’s done so without shyness. In “Birney,” Lee has borrowed the cadence of rap and merged it with pansori, something completely outside the scope of what Korean literature was supposed to be. Later, with his first novel, At Least We Can Apologize, he realized something fundamental, a premise that would accompany him from there on out, as he himself has stated in various interviews: that literature operates in the margins. That is where the imagination blooms, far from the explicit causes, the clear reasons, and the politically correct judgments of the works of many authors who preceded him. When writing At Least We Can Apologize, Lee decided then that reduction—of facts, explanations, even descriptions—was what best served this story that echoes real denunciations from years prior, when various Korean mental institutions were accused of transforming their patients into ruined shells of their former selves. The reader should keep this in mind when reading At Least We Can Apologize, a novel that at times verges on the absurd and contains strokes that could have easily come from the physical comedy of early silent films. The dialogue at some point is written in a style that makes us think of Ionesco: “We’ve decided to earn money by making apologies for people. We hoped that you might become our first customer,” they say to a butcher in total seriousness. The story of Si-bong and Jin-man is not a tragedy, despite the brutality that confronts them and that seems to come from everywhere. A brutality that doesn’t befall just them, but also those they encounter on their journey, like Si-bong’s sister, always on the edge of a nervous breakdown; the pathetic man addicted to horse racing with whom they live; or the female owner of a twenty-four-hour convenience store that feels more a prison than a job. It’s as if “the institution” were in reality the whole country, Lee seems to tell us. Or perhaps At Least We Can Apologize is a tragedy, but full to the brim with a disconcerting, uncomfortable, and cutting humor: “Do you by any chance have something you’d like to apologize for?” “Have you done anything wrong to anyone lately?” “We’ll apologize for you for a great price!” This is the ad that the pair hands out on the streets and sticks to the lampposts. Apology as a service for hire, something for which one can pay. In this sense, Lee uses in a new way a concept that permeates Korean society: guilt. And with guilt comes shame. We are all guilty of something and hence should apologize. To whom? To everyone. For everything. When? Right away.
by Andrés Felipe Solano
[ENGLISH] Across Multiple Leaps: Kim Haengsook’s Human Time Introduces a Major Korean Poet
In his foreword to Kim Haengsook’s Human Time, editor Jake Levine mostly addresses the unusual—but, as he takes pains to make clear, not-unheard-of—circumstances of production of this brilliant anthology: the fact that it is the work of not one or two translators, but rather a “crowded kitchen” of them (to borrow his analogy). All in all, seven co-translators—Léo-Thomas Brylowski, Hannah Hertzog, Susan K, Jiyoon Lee, Joanne Park, Soeun Seo, and Soohyun Yang—have been implicated in a process that Levine describes as “communal workshopping.” Even as Levine quickly runs through the different kinds of good that might come of “interpreting and translating together,” he acknowledges that the Anglophone world as it stands may not be open to this form of translatorly collaboration. Case in point: Kim Hyesoon’s A Drink of Red Mirror, which was also translated by many people in 2019, was deemed ineligible for most of the prizes that year (“No one knows who added the salt and lime,” goes Levine’s hypothesis. “No master chef to worship.”). Should this change? It is this reviewer’s opinion that not only should such translations be welcomed; they can and should be judged alongside other translations. As an English title, Human Time certainly holds its own next to other poetry collections in the world literature canon—and I also mean those that specifically treat time as metaphysical subject. Etel Adnan’s Time (which, in Sarah Riggs’s translation, won the 2020 Griffin International Poetry Prize) comes to mind. Though her work invokes and sometimes appropriates from a whole cast of Western artists (most notably Kafka, but also featuring Orwell, Jodorowsky, Duchamp, Goethe, and possibly Hemingway), Kim’s vision is singularly imaginative, streaked with a genius that sets her apart. Here is Kim on the painful awareness of loss that is forever waiting in the wings: “Like a huge, busting sac of pus / this world is so beautiful it frightens me.” And how does Kim describe her coping mechanism? With her “Goodbye Ability peaking,” she reimagines herself as Kafka having to take a “55-kilogram shit”—but until she absolutely has to take that dump and disappear, she wants to “[hold] it in, frantically writing everything that must be written.” Kim’s insistence on specificity is a sometime feature of her obsessive craft. For example, it is not simply a big shit she has to take, but a “55-kilogram” one. Elsewhere, she describes pain that is “30, 40, 50 centimeters” from her body; “72 ways to take a walk”; people below the decimal point (a certain 0.01 “lying on the street”). Yet, some of her most bracing poetry is given to us entirely in broad brushstrokes, with the irrefutable logic and power of haiku. Consider the opening of “APRIL 16, 1914”: “It’s the date of my birth. / I’m a person who still hasn’t died, so / I’m a person with many dead friends.” It’s been said that a good writer is not just a master of specificity; she also knows when it is called for. Most of the poems in this collection are prose poems, including a pair of set pieces that are three-pages long; around two-fifths are free verse of the shorter kind. Intellectual rigor aside, I was struck by how many of these poems reverberate with one another across dueling motifs of transparency vs. opacity, inside vs. outside (and, perhaps related to that, being exiled at the periphery vs. being ensconced “in the deep”). And thanks to the impressive skills of these translators as a group, many of the works enter into lucid conversation with one another, deepening in meaning and consequence. If I had any reservation at all, it was the feeling that the collection could stand to be slightly more whittled, notwithstanding my general enjoyment of the work, which remains immense. I think Human Time gives us a tour de force introduction to a major talent in contemporary Korean poetry and for that alone, I hope translation prize committees around the world might set aside any reservations about the work being a product of multiple translators and give this collection a fair shake. Don’t dismiss the work simply because it is the product of so much labor and care (the result isn’t always groupthink when more than two collaborate on a project). Think instead of how many versions each of these poems must have survived—across multiple leaps of imagination and understanding—to arrive inside this magnificent collection.
by Lee Yew Leong
[GERMAN] Love for Love in the Big City?
This novel is a composite of four pieces that bleed into each other. Han Kang’s Vegetarian is a comparable case. A juxtaposition of stories, somehow morphed into one. This is why many reviews of Love in the Big City point out inconsistencies, though some maintain that in the end everything falls into place. The four stories are only loosely interconnected and several details about the biographical circumstances of the hero, like family or work, are not streamlined. There is some overall trajectory, but reading this collection of stories as just one work is bound to create frustration.Now, the German translation does not contain the author’s afterword that explains that the narrator of all four parts is “simultaneously the same person and different people”—not very satisfying but of utmost importance. The Korean original even contains information about the publication venues of the four stories, and on the cover of the book, it is declared a yeonjak soseol. The publisher Suhrkamp decided to withhold this crucial information from German readers. Why? Well, yeonjak soseol is admittedly a genre not known in the German-speaking world. The term could be rendered as a “serial” or “omnibus,” but this would be misleading. That this ended up being called a “novel” was perhaps a compromise. But obviously, it leads readers up the garden path and does the book a disservice.As for the first story of Love in the Big City, I was hooked by its witty beginning, but this impression faded. There is a flippancy and hedonistic carelessness here that I find only semi-funny, and the superficial reflection is unsophisticated in the extreme: “Jaehee learned that living as a gay was sometimes truly shitty, and I learned that living as a woman wasn’t much better.” Much stronger is the second story. The narrator describes his troubled intimate relationship with an older former student activist, an anti-American intellectual who cannot accept his own queerness. Falling in love with said man, the narrator reflects: “My thoughts were full of things he might be interested in. I felt my sensitivity to the world around me heightening.” Quite a development considering that the protagonist of the first story declared his contempt for self-awareness (“a disease in itself”). A major sideshow is the hero’s travails with his cancer-ailing mother, an ardent Christian, whose only way to relate to her son’s homosexuality is denial. Literature opens our eyes for the riches of embarrassment, as humiliations often prove more fecund for narration than victories. The first story does not offer much in that regard, except for a botched congratulatory song at a wedding. But the second story contains scenes like, the hero helping his mother on the toilet, only to be thanked with, “I should have had a daughter.” After the overfucked but underloved bravado of the first story, we encounter hints at vulnerability—partly due to the queer condition—and much talk about loneliness. The lousy sex life of the narrator and his friend is recapitulated with a good dose of tragicomedy. The couple accepts the need for condoms because one of them carries an STI, but rolling on a condom entails erectile dysfunction on the part of the friend “really every time,” and the side effects from taking Viagra prove too heavy. Likewise, the relationship described (from different angles) in the third and fourth stories is characterized by a paucity of sex. Somehow this frailty lends itself better to reflection, consciousness, and self-exploration. This compensates for a psychological shallowness that sometimes baffles—as when the narrator recalls the day when he was discharged from military service as follows: “The only three things floating around in my brain were iced Americano, Kylie Minogue, and sex.” Pop music references are all over this book (a full soundtrack, altogether), as is laughter. Every now and then, the hero bursts into laughter, has a fit of laughter, cannot repress his urge to laugh, etc. But almost never is this triggered by something irresistibly hilarious (so that I would join in automatically). One of the most telling hysterics happens when a Malay, one of the hero’s countless bedpartners, asks about the meaning of jeok-pye-cheong-san, a slogan he heard from Korean demonstrators. The “eradication of deep-rooted evils” was former president Moon Jae-in’s signature campaign. The foreigner’s distortion of the Korean syllables may be ludicrous, but the ensuing fit of laughter comes across as disproportionate. What shines through here, is the hero’s apolitical disenchantment—his nickname “Garfield,” originally referring to being overweight, thus gains an additional layer of deeper meaning. This is not the kind of writing that warrants close reading and the savoring of intricately crafted periodic sentences. But I have moved gradually towards appreciating some merits of this book, which are in my view not well covered by the ballyhoo with which it is promoted.
by Andreas Schirmer
[ENGLISH] Space Force – Less Is More
Everyone loves a good underdog hero story. Science fiction has always been a popular medium to portray outmatched human characters taking on formidable alien forces against impossible odds. In his most recent novel, Launch Something!, Bae Myung-hoon takes on this theme by presenting a band of misfits who work for a chronically underfunded branch of the Korean armed forces called the ROK Space Force, set in the undetermined future. In the opening chapter, the world is under existential threat by a second artificial sun that an unknown alien force has placed in the sky to radiate ultraviolet heat back to Earth. (The symbolic reference to today’s very real climate change crisis is not lost.) The Allied Space Force, characteristically dominated by the Americans, is mobilizing to attack this nefarious object. The puny ROK Space Force, desperate to contribute to the effort, is ordered to launch something—anything! After this intriguing setup, the story then focuses on a few leading characters who populate the ROK Space Force. There is Captain Um, an earnest intelligence officer who is forced by severe budget constraints to resort to paper origami to reverse engineer the construction of satellites spotted in orbit. Master Sergeant Han is one of several very strong female characters who is an ace remote pilot but with no actual ship to fly, effectively grounding her as an expert video gamer. Private Lee, or Oste, is a K-pop boyband member serving his mandatory military service in the ROK Space Force who hosts a radio show called Let’s Raise the Density! Other characters are trapped in the mundane existence of sprawling government and military bureaucracies. Major General Lee Jongro becomes a prominent character who, as former Vice Minister of Mars, returns to Earth and stirs up events that have global consequences. The atmosphere on Mars has been fully terraformed to support large populations of humans as a home planet alternative. And as always, when groups of people band together into societies, political tensions and rivalries develop. These conflicts provide a useful subtext for the story’s tension and satirical elements. In the first half of the book, the predominant theme is of restlessness and ennui. Despite the deadly threat facing humanity due to the artificial sun, the characters primarily focus on the boredom of their individual, day to day lives. The author portrays the harmful indifference that can afflict individuals when they lack the agency to deal with challenges confronting them. The characters’ sense of helplessness is compounded by both the marginal role of Korea’s Space Force as well as their own constricted roles in the larger bureaucratic machinery. Clearly, there are parallels being drawn to the real-world hierarchical work environment in Korean society that pervades large organizations. Bae also seems to be satirizing the uneven global response to climate change, where individual habits hold priority over communal goals. The narrative pace through most of this section is slow and measured. The lack of urgency can be disconcerting and incongruous when compared to the initial energetic set up. However, the reader gains deeper insight into the personalities of the protagonists as a large portion of the story is delivered through the mundane dialogue between the characters. The reader is left to wonder why their individual foibles matter so much when life on earth is at imminent risk. The emotional investment by the reader in the characters is partially established through feeling unsettled at their seeming indifference. In the latter third of the book, the pace quickens as the story pivots to become more thriller-esque. A sinister plot between Mars and Earth is clearly afoot, and our not-so-merry band of spacenautic characters is thrust into having to figure out what’s going on and who the culprits are. Ultimately, the seemingly insignificant Korea outpost of the Allied Space Force ends up playing an outsized role in trying to resolve the crisis. The story is thereby transformed into a David versus Goliath tale, or one of Rocky Balboa facing Apollo Creed. It pits Korea’s resourcefulness against the brute might that is America. As he makes his way toward a satisfying conclusion, Bae throws in some intriguing bits of real science. The difference in the duration of a Martian day with the Earth’s presents interesting challenges for the working hours and sleep patterns of some of the characters. The differing orbits of the Sun, Mars and Earth and the varying distances that result also pose challenges in communications and travel times. A fascinating scenario called the Kessler Syndrome—which postulates that the increasing density of orbiting satellites and their debris around the Earth can cause catastrophic damage to the entire system from collisions—needs to be overcome. The focus on the interior lives of the main characters is an unusual device in a science fiction tale, particularly one where so much of the personal attributes are conveyed principally through dialogue. However, in this particular story, Bae makes clear that the fictionalized technological setting is not as relevant as how people behave when feeling disenfranchised and powerless. The past few years of COVID and the accelerating threat of climate change demonstrate two different responses to crises by human beings. In the case of COVID, divergent groups of people from around the world collectively mobilized to develop vaccines and policies to mitigate loss. In the case of climate change, however, fear persists that powerful, entrenched interests and political forces are not providing—and are perhaps blocking—an adequate response. Bae’s novel explores the debilitating emotional consequences to individuals in the latter circumstance. There is always the fortunate possibility that a band of underdogs can come out of nowhere to save the world in the eleventh hour. However, hoping for that outcome while most people remain nonplussed is an unsettling emotion, a theme that sits at the heart of Bae’s story.
by Phillip Y. Kim
[ENGLISH] I Send a Text Message: Sin Yong-Mok’s Paradoxical Realism
The poems in Sin Yong-Mok’s collection, Concealed Words, may initially throw the reader into confusion. Brother Anthony1 suggests in his translator’s note that one’s first impression of the poems may be of “a seemingly incoherent stream of images.” If you have ever had a conversation with a person in the midst of a mental break, you may be reminded of that conversation when you begin to read. People undergoing a delusion may speak as matter-of-factly as anyone else, may be as confident as anyone else that a listener will be able to follow their logic. One poem informs us that the wind has jaws, then shows us a plastic bag and tells us that the wind has bitten it. Another poem reasons thus: “If the riverbank is a coffin, then the estuary digs graves.” A third asserts that: [· · ·] Of course like snowflakes briefly fluttering through the air’s empty valleys pass from a silence to silence like the way a snowman slowly drowns in its body melting in the morning’s empty space I wanted to go flowing away to a place nobody knew. But here, I was able to understand. I’ve seen snowmen drowning; I’ve wanted to go flowing away. And when I returned to those earlier poems, I was able to imagine not only the wind’s jaws, but also its windpipe (which the birds peck at). Brother Anthony suggests in the foreword that instead of trying to parse the poet’s words, we might simply follow where they take us. If we can swim behind the poet through the worlds he opens, the ways in which we perceive our own worlds will expand. The poems are written in a stream-of-consciousness style, perhaps the most fearless example I have ever encountered. Sin refuses to slow the flow of his ideas for our benefit. We must leap in and immediately begin to swim, and if we don’t yet know how, we must quickly learn. Describing his own learning in this medium, Sin writes: “Poetry has taught me that my body is a place into which everything sinks and a place where everything is connected! Small things and larger things, past and present, even life and death. To show that these things exist substantially while writing poetry I came up with the idea that my body might exist! The sorrow that comes visiting my body is proof that all these things are using my body!” The poet embodies all that he experiences, and even what he does not experience, but which somehow “comes visiting.” This embodiment brings with it a joy that the reader shares—a joy in the articulation of truths that transcend the bounds of logic. This joy is palpable even in Sin’s most sorrowful poems. I think we may sometimes intuit more through our ears than through our eyes, and so I recommend reading these poems aloud whenever possible. Now, I, too, am thinking about the body, albeit in simpler and more earthbound terms than the poet. It is with gratitude and some discomfort that I admit to feeling as though my brain has been rearranged. Perhaps reading Sin transforms the reader into one capable of reading him. Sorrow remains, but its circumstances are more openly shared with the reader—reflecting, perhaps, a growing confidence in maturity. We see sorrow particularized in the death of a parent and in the experience of heartbreak. These lines appear in the poem “A Sandglass”: When someone called someone I looked back. Even though someone did not call someone I looked back. The backwards glance is characteristic of this poet (and many of Sin’s poems are about the poet’s vocation), but it is also characteristic of a person at the end of a love affair. A broken connection makes one more alert to any existing connections—or possibilities for connection— in the larger world. A person who has lost love will often listen for the sound of someone calling and will often look back. Stylistically, although surrealist approaches run through all the poems collected here, the newer works deploy Sin’s jarring and paradoxically fitting juxtapositions towards a particular end—cutting through the loveliness of individual lines almost compulsively and sometimes literally: The moon rises, and night sparkles at the bottom of a dark well that someone threw a sword into. The first line, harkening back to both Joseon- and Romantic-era poetry, evokes the peaceful image of reflected light in still water. The second line shows us instead a glittering sword. Whereas earlier works included discordant reminders of modernity, like a power station appearing in a snowy field, interjections like this one introduce a specific element of violence. (This particular poem ends with a commonly-used bit of corporate-speak that takes on an ominous meaning and some dark humor, given the recent sword: “Let’s try to get along well.”) Knives and other cutting implements appear with greater and greater frequency as the poems move forward, reminding us that violence is always present, perhaps even necessary. In these later poems, Brother Anthony aptly points out that Sin’s strategy of “defamiliarization” seems to be deployed towards a particular aim—what I would call a realist aim. There is in these poems a refusal to create artificially harmonious poetic worlds, an insistence on pointing “with a clear finger” at the here and now, an insistence that we listen to the world’s dissonances. These poems will slap any romantic or Romantic stupor out of our eyes. But all of this is not to suggest that Concealed Words is a grim read. On the contrary, lines like those quoted above flash with wit and liveliness, letting us see the “mischievous smile” Brother Anthony says that the poet often wears. It is invigorating to read these poems. They show us how we might face the difficulties and paradoxes in what we call real life. Nadia Kalman Editor, Words Without Borders Campus (wwb-campus.org) Author, The Cosmopolitans (Livingston Press, 2010) [1] Disclosure: Brother Anthony also wrote the introduction to the collection of Korean literature on Words Without Borders Campus.
by Nadia Kalman
[CHINESE] The Only Solace in the Utmost Darkness
A bleak and absurd atmosphere pervades the novels of Bora Chung. Her readers will feel a shiver run down their spines when reading her works, among which is Cursed Bunny, a short story collection shortlisted for the 2022 International Booker Prize. These ten stories are seemingly unrelated to each other, yet all are filled with revenge, curses, slaughter and betrayal. In the title story, “Cursed Bunny,” the narrator walks into the darkness after bidding farewell to his grandfather’s spirit who is standing still in the river of time with complete amnesia. “In this twisted world, this darkness is my only solace,” the narrator sighs. The short story “Snare” amplifies human greed and cruelty spreading beyond the main character’s yard in the form of a legend. With a shamanic ending, the writer tells us that the bloodline of greed still continues insidiously within human society. In “Goodbye, My Love,” the common motif of robots attacking humans is renovated with the tricks of love and betrayal between the master and the robot. “The Frozen Finger” tells a story of an eerie car accident in a swamp, where an insidious curse becomes bizarrely tied up with the driver’s memories of her dying, post-death, and living moments, creating a terrifying but intriguing experience. All ten short stories are briefly detached from the real world, and can thus be labelled as surrealism, magical realism, fantasy, science fiction, horror, or fable. However, this detachment is transient, because through these magical, frightening and absurd stories, we can feel the suffocating oppression and conflicts that occur as often as not in society, and witness the vile reality of greed and wealth. The talent to construct these fables stems from the writer’s free and unrestrained creative imagination. Chung, who studied in Europe and received her PhD in the US, teaches Russian literature and science fiction. Her academic and life experiences have given her the ability to “break” literary inertia and spiritual shackles, enabling her works to cross boundaries with ease—boundaries between life and death, human and spirits, humans and other species, and even humans and objects. In some traditions, human life is akin to a long river where life and death are the two banks. The journey of life may be likened to “crossing the river,” that is, the process of going from one bank to the other. However, in Chung’s stories, this process is often broken and the clear boundary between life and death is constantly “crossed.” In “Cursed Bunny,” life is frozen, or recurs as a fixed memory. When the grandfather, who symbolizes death, disappears in the river of time, the two banks disappear altogether, leading to an overwhelming question: “Will the river be in its original state of life without its banks?” In “Reunion,” an old man’s walks through a plaza in Poland unfold into a hauntingly beautiful story between the narrator and her tormented lover. She concludes: “Whether alive or dead, [we are] ghosts of the past.” In “The Head,” the garbage thrown into the toilet forms a blurred human head that often talks to its owner. As time passes, the head develops into a full human form, comes out of the toilet, and replaces its owner after stuffing her into the toilet. In these stories, the familiar boundaries between life and death, human and ghost, human and things blur or disappear, conjuring up the dark and uncanny. Reading this collection is like walking into a pitch dark alley alone, but when you gaze into the darkness amidst this tense silence, you may somehow feel a bit of solace. For only a lonely person can become so profound and deep, and only a lonely gaze so limpid and pure. Jin Hezhe Translator, Gwanchon Essays (People’s Literature Publishing House, 2012) by Lee Mun Ku Associate professor, Department of Korean Studies, Harbin Institute of Technology, Weihai
by Jin Hezhe
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